It’s not like Roush Fenway is far off. Biffle, who finished fifth in the Cup standings last year, said the team was a bit behind at the end of last year as it failed to match the other organizations in the Chase for the Sprint Cup.

And then came the new car. He has just four top-10 finishes in 11 races (36 percent) this year. Last year, he had 21 top-10s in 36 races (58 percent).

“It seems this car is more finicky,” Biffle said. “It wants to be perfect or you’re way off. The splitter sensitivity is real (big). … The thing seems sensitive to where it wants to run.

“I don’t know if it’s a bunch more (sensitive) than the old car, but it seems like hitting that setup has been harder for us to get it right. Our group, we’ve had a harder time nailing it.”

NASCAR switched to the new Gen-6 car this season and the Ford teams in general appear to be behind Chevy and Toyota.

Toyota has won five of the 11 races, all by Joe Gibbs Racing. Matt Kenseth, who left Roush to join Gibbs during the offseason, leads the series with three wins.

Chevrolet has four wins, three by Hendrick Motorsports. Points leader Jimmie Johnson has two wins, and also won the non-points Sprint All-Star Race Saturday night.

Ford has just two wins. Biffle teammate Carl Edwards, who is second in points, won at Phoenix and David Ragan scored an upset for Front Row Motorsports, winning at Talladega.

Penske Racing, which switched from Dodge to Ford this year, has been hot and cold. Defending Cup champion Brad Keselowski has not won a race yet and slipped to seventh in the standings after a 25-point penalty and three straight poor finishes. Teammate Joey Logano is 19th in points.

Biffle and Edwards believe they can find what they’re missing.

Edwards won the second race of the season and is second in the standings a year after missing the Chase. But beyond leading 122 laps at Phoenix, he has led just 24 laps —19 at Kansas and five at Talladega. In the last points race, he started 17th and finished seventh at Darlington.

Biffle was fourth in points and then had a shock break at Richmond and was in a wreck in Talladega for back-to-back 36th-place finishes. He then finished 13th at Darlington, one of his best tracks and where he has won twice.

“The one that makes us all nervous was Darlington because we all thought we were going to run really well there,” Edwards said. “There is no better driver at Darlington than Greg Biffle and I feel like I’m pretty good at Darlington and we struggled there.

“So that’s one that made us really nervous and we feel like Atlanta, Homestead — those places drive a lot like Darlington, where the tires fall off — so that’s what we’re working on right now. The good thing is we have a lot of time leading up to the Chase and we feel like that’s where we really need to peak.”

They will have 600 miles to get the car right this weekend in the season’s longest race, a 400-lap marathon at Charlotte Motor Speedway. They look at Kansas where teammate Ricky Stenhouse Jr. had one of the best cars late in the race and know they can get the Gen-6 car working in their comfort zone.

“It’s not where it needs to be or where we want it to be,” Edwards said. “Everybody in the shop is working as hard as they can and, trust me, we’ve had some meetings where we’ve sat down and we’ve had some real tough conversations about what we need to do to be better, what we can do. … It’s not all doom and gloom.”

Last week in the all-star race, Edwards won the pole but failed to lead a lap, and the Roush Fenway cars were a non-factor throughout the event.

“I’m not happy unless I’m in the top five,” Biffle said. “We’re capable of running in the top five. If we run in the top five, we’ve got some fine-tuning to do.

“When we’re running 13th, we have bigger chunks to work on.”

He hopes that after this weekend, those chunks will be smaller.

“We still have time to claw our way back up there and if we get a couple good finishes in a row or a couple top-fives, win one of these races, I certainly think we’re going to be right back in the hunt,” Biffle said.

“We just need to continue to get our cars better is where we’re really working. We feel we’re a little bit behind the competition, not far, but get competitive and winning a couple of these races and the points will take care of itself.”